The Missing Girls: How China’s One-Child Policy Tore Families Apart

September 18, 2024

The PRC flag flying in the foreground and a city in the background

(Wall Street Journal) – A now-ended adoption program created the perception that Chinese girls weren’t valued. One adoptee, once hidden in a grocery bag, found there was more to her own story.

In “Ricki’s Promise,” a 2014 documentary by Changfu Chang, a professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, Mudd described how her parents kept her hidden from authorities, carrying her in a grocery bag on the rare occasions they took her out. They put her in a foster family when she was 3, but after local officials discovered her existence, she was sent to an orphanage. Her father tried in vain to get her back. Two years later, she flew to Seattle with her new parents.

By the time Mudd met her birthparents, they were divorced, unable to overcome the rift that had developed between the two sides of the family over her fate. (Read More)